How Color Affects Marketing and Branding

Every day we are overloaded by the thousands of brand images and marketing campaigns on the web. Every business is trying to captivate audiences’ attention and stand out from the crowd. So designers and marketers are really facing a challenge here. How to survive in the bottomless ocean of content, you would ask? One of the most important parts of design is color. It helps to get noticed, communicate the right message, reach the audience, and at the same time get lost in translation. Right color applied to a product or service can help you stay on the surface and enjoy marketing success. Want to check? Come here www.designcontest.uk/logo-design/ Why do you click and browse some websites and not others? What makes you purchase products from one online seller not the other? Could emotional response to brand colors have something to do with this? Choosing the right color scheme is crucial to how your brand is viewed. When thinking over your brand’s marketing campaign and advertising, it is necessary to understand the way color works, what effect it has on human emotions, and how it is interpreted by the consumers. Use this highly influential tool to differ from the outside competition.

The power of color

Color improves brand recognition

Audience tends to get used to a certain brand based on its image alone. The color scheme that you select can lead you to success and the same way lead you to failure, it can contribute to a positive and negative recognition. Colors can make your brand seem fascinating, compelling, alluring, and spellbinding, just as it can make your brand look overblown, hollow, greedy or even vicious.

Color attracts attention

You gonna miss out hugely if you don’t use color to appeal to potential consumers. Successful brands are all taking advantage of the color power. We all remember when Apple decided to make iMacs colorful. They brought color to the industry where it had never been used before. Bright computers rejuvenated the brand that had over$1.8 billion of losses in two years.

But you have to understand that the attention that color brings can be negative too, it can destroy the brand completely. Think about Crystal Pepsi. The drink existed only for one year and then was pulled of the market. It was marketed as a caffeine-free “clear alternative” to normal colas. But drinking something that looked like Sprite but tasted like Coke didn’t seem right.

Color can help accentuate or hide information

We are talking about the manipulation of color in fine prints here. Not only they are tiny but colored in grayscale. This is done to avoid catching the eye of readers. Have you seen fine prints colored in vivid hues? Don’t underestimate the effect of color on your conversion rate. Highlight fields and information with a striking color to make a difference, and color unwanted information as subtly as possible.

Color brings the right audience

Different colors attract different people. Women and men, children and adults, everyone reacts specifically to particular colors. Our color preferences depend upon our gender, age, education, our childhood associations with certain colors, our life experiences, and upon the culture we grew up in. Learn about the market you are trying to attract and speak the color language that they will best respond to. Test your color choices on a small sample of your market, get feedback and then choose the colors which give you the best response.

Choose a color that correlates with what you are trying to achieve.

Red

• Encourages appetite (fast-food restaurants).
• Creates a sense of urgency (clearance sales).
• Associated with movement, excitement and passion.
• Is high in energy.
• Raises blood pressure and heart rate.
• Used for impulsive shoppers.

Lays, Lego, Adobe, H’n’M. Blue

• Preferred by men.
• Associated with peace, water, tranquility.
• Provides a sense of reliability.
• Most common for offices and corporate brands.
• Curbs appetite.

Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Vimeo. Green

• Associated with nature and health.
• Used to relax customers.
• Reminds of money and wealth.
• Used for promoting environmental issues.

Animal planet, Starbucks coffee, Holiday Inn. Purple

• Associated with royalty.
• Used for beauty and anti-aging products.
• Represents creative and wise brands.

Yahoo, Hallmark, Wonka. Orange and yellow

• Promotes enthusiasm.
• Draws in impulsive shoppers.
• Increases optimism.
• Encourages communication.

DHL, Best Buy, CAT. Black

• Associated with power, strength and authority.
• Symbolizes intelligence.
• If used to frequently can overwhelm people.

Nike, Converse, Chanel, Adidas. White

• Associated with purity, safety and cleanliness.
• Sparks a sense of creativity.

Apple.

Conclusion

The use of color in marketing and business can be fine-tuned depending on one’s needs. A smart branding will utilize the psychological effects of color to attract customers. Many of the big brand names which you see every day have been tested in order to create a particular response. Brian Jens used to present only fresh and interesting articles to his readers. He is smart and talented blogger and designer of DesignContest Marketing Department. 🙂

To put this into practice, expand your brand color into a working system with the brand color palette generator, or explore hue relationships on the interactive color wheel.